


Desire Beneath the Earth

by matrixrefugee



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-04-19
Packaged: 2020-01-16 08:54:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18518128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matrixrefugee/pseuds/matrixrefugee
Summary: Hades only desires companionship in his realm...





	Desire Beneath the Earth

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Greek Mythology, Hades/Persephone (+ any other characters), what inspired him to kidnap Persephone?](http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/26989.html?thread=1234029&format=light#cmt1234029)

Hades envied the world above, for its light and the wealth of its plant life. In his realm, only a perpetual dullness reigned. Even the plants down here had the same drab, uniform dull grey to their foliage. No sunlight, only perpetual twilight, easy on the eyes, but tiring to the spirit.

Just once, he wished for light and warmth and fecundity in this realm. Granted, that went counter to the meaning of the realm of death, but he longed for something contrary to bring a welcome disruption to the constant dullness and drabness. Anything to keep from going mad in the shadows and the cold.

And then he sensed her, walking the face of mother Earth, Gaea's most cherished granddaughter, Demeter's child formed from her substance with no god's intervention. Persephone, the sweet girl, flowers springing up as she trod the earth, Gaea's laughter and delight at the beauty of the girl. Her songs that brought the birds winging from miles around, so sweet they echoed as far down as this dim cavern, this sterile corner of Gaea's flesh.

And he felt his heart, if he had a heart, weeping as it craved her, as he longed to see her beauty lighting the shadows of his kingdom. Her footsteps might make the underworld blossom, if only for a short time, if only for a season. Spring in the underworld: if she could see how the cold and darkness gripped his world, she might take compassion on it and on him. She might agree to be his queen, if only for a while.

And so he left his kingdom, one night, approaching Persephone from the shadows of the lowering twilight. She looked on him and she quailed back, frightened. He begged her not to fear him: she claimed the immortality of her kind and she would never feel the touch of death. But he begged her to come with him, if only for a short time, to bring her beauty and her craft to his realm and break its monotony.

She refused: to do so would pervert the order of life and death, of fecundity and sterility, light and shadow.

He regarded her with disappointment, the thing he had seen on the faces of mortals who had arrived suddenly in his realm, thinking that somehow they could cheat him, and for once, he understood why they felt so. He turned away, drawing his cloak around himself and stepped back across the veil between the realms.

But he did not go without a plan forming in his mind: if she would not come of her own choosing, she would come by his.


End file.
